‘I profess they run,’ Cromwell shouted. His soldiers later remembered him laughing ‘as if he had been drunk, and his eyes sparkled with spirits, carried on as with a divine impulse.’

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As the Scots broke, the English soldiers, while singing the two-verse Psalm 117, quickly regrouped. Then Cromwell unleashed them to hound and butcher the fleeing survivors for eight miles. Most of the estimated 3,000 Scots killed at Dunbar were probably slain in the final rout. Cromwell claimed to have ‘lost not above thirty men,’ though that is probably a low estimate. The English commander also stated he had captured 10,000 prisoners, then released half because they were ‘almost starved sick and wounded.’

He did send 5,100 prisoners south to Newcastle because he didn’t have enough food to feed them. There was no accepted common policy on the treatment of prisoners in the 17th century. They could be ransomed, killed, exchanged or even recruited by the conquering side. In this instance, Cromwell turned them over to the governor of Newcastle. No food was provided to them for the march south. At Morpeth, the prisoners spent the night in a cabbage field and ate raw cabbages, roots and all. Sickness and hunger killed hundreds, and within two months only half were still alive. The English government shipped the survivors to the North American colonies of Virginia and New England. Sixteen-year-old John Cragin, an ancestor of the author, was one of those shipped to Massachusetts as an indentured servant.

The battle led to disaster for Scotland. Once reinforced, Cromwell quickly captured Edinburgh, though the castle there held out until December 23. The Scottish government, less firmly controlled by the radical Presbyterians, abolished the Act of Classes and raised another army. In 1651, Charles II and David Leslie led their new army into England to draw Cromwell’s out of Scotland and gain English support. Cromwell, however, defeated Charles and Leslie at Worcester on September 3, exactly one year after the Battle of Dunbar. Leslie was captured afterward and imprisoned until 1660. Charles again fled into exile. In the autumn of 1651, Scotland was absorbed into the English Commonwealth, and for many years was ruled as an occupied state.

The English, too, paid a high price for trusting Cromwell. In April 1653, he turned against his political backers, dismissed the Council of State and Parliament and ruled as ‘Lord Protector’–in essence, a military dictator–until his death on September 3, 1658. Chastened by the horrors of arbitrary rule, the English reverted to a system that promised stability. In 1660, they offered Charles II the English crown. Thus the Stuart monarchy was restored and England and Scotland split apart once again.

The Battle of Dunbar was an aberration in Anglo-Scottish warfare in that the two sides were fairly evenly matched. A victory would have given the Scots a resonating moment of pride like the Battles of Stirling Bridge in 1297 and Bannockburn in 1314.

Instead, the battle was a triumph for Cromwell, perhaps his greatest. To commemorate the victory, he awarded everyone in his army a medal that bore his own likeness–the first time common soldiers received such a reward.

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